COVID pushed 32 million Indians out of middle class: Pew research

Number of Indians in the middle class, or those earning between $10-$20 a day, shrank by about 32 million, study says.

Financial woes brought by last year’s coronavirus pandemic have pushed about 32 million Indians out of the middle class, undoing years of economic gains, a report showed on Thursday, while job losses pushed millions into poverty. The number of Indians in the middle class, or those earning between $10 and $20 a day, shrank by about 32 million, compared with the number that could have been reached in the absence of a pandemic, the United States-based Pew Research Centre said. A year into the pandemic, the numbers of those in the middle class has shrunk to 66 million, down a third from a pre-pandemic estimate of 99 million, it added.